Menno (29) learns to walk again after spinal cord injury: 'Doctor said I would never be able to do that again'
The descent of a ski slope is anything but unfamiliar to Menno Streefland (29). He skis several times a year, until he realizes after a serious fall at the beginning of 2023 that he no longer feels his lower body.
Now, a year and a half later, he launches Spines; a back protector with which he hopes to protect other winter sports enthusiasts from what happened to him.
Everything was fine
Menno says that before the accident, 'everything was fine' in his life. “I had a nice job in sales, coached a women's hockey team, and played hockey myself, my housemates had just left, and I had been living with my girlfriend in my old student house for a year. The whole place had just been renovated and I had peace in my life."Everything was fine, but that realization only really came after that day.”
Paralyzed
That day, January 14, 2023, he goes, as he has so often done, onto the slopes. At that moment, he is an avid winter sports enthusiast and tries to travel to Austria at least three times a year. “On the way down, I missed an ice plate. Every skier knows that feeling, losing control. Normally, you regain that control, but that one time I couldn’t. As a result, I fell into a pit along the slope, ten meters down, causing my body to fold in half.”
Menno remains conscious and immediately calls the emergency services, his colleagues – with whom he is on a skiing trip -, his mother, and his girlfriend. “I knew right away that it was serious and had to tell them that I felt nothing from my navel down.”"
Hospital
The ambulance helicopter is with him in no time and takes him to the hospital. “I was brilliantly operated on there because in those hospitals they treat patients with back injuries every day. They made sure that I am doing so well now.” When he wakes up from the surgery, his mother and girlfriend are by his bedside. “They immediately got on a plane to be with me.”
The first diagnosis is a spinal cord injury, where the doctor informs Menno that he will never walk again. “He told my mother that I could be very happy in a wheelchair. I said screw that, that’s not going to happen – to my parents, not to the doctor – because I believed that one day I would use my legs again.""Later it turns out that the spinal cord injury is incomplete, which means that the nerves are not completely damaged and recovery is possible.
Opportunities
The fact that the feeling in his legs is slowly but surely returning makes him work extra hard to fully recover. “I also thought to myself: I am so lucky with the place where I live, with the financial opportunities that are available, and the care we have in the Netherlands; if anyone is going to recover, it’s me. I have to seize every opportunity, because there are people who don’t get these chances. Those people sometimes send me messages from countries where things are much less well organized. We have it so good here.
Recovery
He is recovering – although he is certainly not back to the physical state he was in before the accident. “But I feel it again when I stub my toe. That seems annoying, but it’s amazing when you see where I came from."The feeling in my feet is not optimal yet, but I can now walk with a walker and – when I find my balance – I can stand up straight on my own. That’s really nice for shaving and washing my hands. And I can turn over in bed without the help of my arms.”
Besides his part-time job, Menno trains hard three times a week to make sure his muscles get stronger. “When my right glute muscle starts working again, I can eventually walk without a walker. In terms of recovery, I’m currently at 50%, but I’m going to make sure that becomes 90%.”
Comments
As long as the wheelchair – which he needs for longer distances – and the walker are still necessary, you definitely won’t just find Menno at home on the couch. When he’s not coaching the UNO hockey ladies, he’s, for example, at the pub with his friends. "You can definitely tell that once the brakes are off with a few drinks, people start making comments.
Then someone shouts 'Hey, disabled!' at me, or they tap me on the back in the street with the remark 'Are you walking okay?'. I can handle that just fine if we're friends, but not if you're a complete stranger. Sometimes I can be quite quick-witted and say: 'At least my injury will heal, your personality won't', haha."
Back protectors
Alongside his busy schedule of work, physiotherapy, and socializing, Menno wants to ensure that others come back home unscathed from a ski trip in the coming winters. That's why he's designing a back protector, flying to China to finalize the designs, and has been selling them online since this week. “It's so obvious to wear a helmet, but a back protector is not yet. It's my dream to get at least 10,000 winter sports enthusiasts safely on their ski holidays.""If I had worn such a thing, the damage would probably have been less."
He is completely transparent about the costs. The amount you pay for a back protector of his brand Spines automatically includes a donation of €15 to expedite research into curing spinal cord injuries. "If we sell those 10,000 back protectors, I can already donate €150.000 and hopefully, during my lifetime, a way to cure it will come. In the meantime, I will make sure everything is as great as it was before my accident."
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